AlignBot: Aligning VLM-powered Customized Task Planning with User Reminders Through Fine-Tuning for Household Robots

TL;DR

AlignBot is a fine-tuned multimodal framework that enhances household robot task planning by effectively integrating user reminders, leading to significant improvements over baseline models in real-world settings.

Contribution

The paper introduces AlignBot, a novel fine-tuning approach that aligns VLM-powered task planning with user reminders using a dynamic retrieval mechanism and structured prompts.

Findings

Achieved 86.8% success rate in real-world household tasks.

Outperformed baseline GPT-4o by 65% in task success.

Demonstrated effectiveness with a multimodal dataset of over 1,500 entries.

Abstract

This paper presents AlignBot, a novel framework designed to optimize VLM-powered customized task planning for household robots by effectively aligning with user reminders. In domestic settings, aligning task planning with user reminders poses significant challenges due to the limited quantity, diversity, and multimodal nature of the reminders. To address these challenges, AlignBot employs a fine-tuned LLaVA-7B model, functioning as an adapter for GPT-4o. This adapter model internalizes diverse forms of user reminders-such as personalized preferences, corrective guidance, and contextual assistance-into structured instruction-formatted cues that prompt GPT-4o in generating customized task plans. Additionally, AlignBot integrates a dynamic retrieval mechanism that selects task-relevant historical successes as prompts for GPT-4o, further enhancing task planning accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of AlignBot, experiments are conducted in real-world household environments, which are constructed within the laboratory to replicate typical household settings. A multimodal dataset with over 1,500 entries derived from volunteer reminders is used for training and evaluation. The results demonstrate that AlignBot significantly improves customized task planning, outperforming existing LLM- and VLM-powered planners by interpreting and aligning with user reminders, achieving 86.8% success rate compared to the vanilla GPT-4o baseline at 21.6%, reflecting a 65% improvement and over four times greater effectiveness. Supplementary materials are available at: https://yding25.com/AlignBot/